Eco-anxious Cult Follower

I was in Whole Foods and saw the magazine San Francisco from this month with the tagline, "It's new. It's green. It's eco-anxiety." That sounded familiar so I bought it, hoping it was printed with soy-based ink on post-consumer content recycled paper. (If not I can loan it to five other people before recycling it.) That may seem like an obsessive thought process but it's not that far from the truth and I'm not the only one apparently. Apparently this bubble I live in breeds us eco-worriers: "There's a Bay Area personality type--perfectionist, hardworking, inclined toward extremes, self-righteous about many things--for whom environmental worry is the ideal platform on which to pontificate." Sounds about right.

Since I settled back down in the Bay Area, I seem to be constantly assessing my impact as a human being in this world. I was sure the end of oil was going to plummet us into the new dark ages; I read the ingredients on processed food trying to avoid corn products (I think high fructose corn syrup is its own food group now); I want my burger from a cow that was grass-fed while getting daily massages for stress; and won't somebody please think of the polar bears (a la Mrs. Lovejoy.) These are exciting times and I like the movement towards living "green" and saving the environment, but it's easy to go overboard sometimes. Forgive me if I've tried selling you on the latest and greatest like a new cult member who's sure he's found the answers. But please do recycle my Nikes if you find me face down in the rising sea when the ice caps melt.

I have been trying to do my part in my industry, though. I specify sustainable building products and try to design efficiently to minimize the amount of materials used, but there's still only so much I can do as the engineer. I took another green building course, which always sends me away so inspired. There are some many cool things that I want to try out: I want to harvest rainwater, set up a gray water system, keep chickens in my backyard, redo the yard with bay friendly landscaping. I need my own house to use as a laboratory for these experiments. Maybe this is the year to do it.

WiFi Thermostat

When we moved into our house in Oakland, one of the first things I did was replace the old (probably original) thermostat with a digital programmable one. I wanted to be able to control when the furnace came on so that it would only heat the house when we were going to be in it. But this was based on a schedule that I can only approximate according to our daily habits, which can more or less stay the same but are usually in some sort of flux. I have ours set so that it comes on for an hour in the morning while we get ready and then again in the evening when we come home from work. But then there are those days when we don't come home right after work, or weekends away, or vacations and the thermostat keeps following the same schedule.

I started thinking that with all this technology someone should invent a way of controlling the thermostat remotely via the wireless network in your house. But of course, someone already has invented it. I actually found two different viable devices, but that seems to about it so far. The one by Proliphix, though, needs to be hardwired to the network. The other works wirelessly, but is part of a larger system that is actually more for security. It's by a company called iControl Networks. The whole system looks pretty slick and it is all accessible via a web browser, or even a web-enabled phone. That means from practically anywhere you can turn the heat on and off or adjust the schedule to fit your current situation. The one downside, I thought, is the monthly subscription fee they charge to use the system.

I think this is just the start of something that we will see become more common. I've heard talk of smart homes, which still feels like a niche market, but I think we'll start seeing more of them within reach of the average consumer and then eventually fairly standard. I'm looking forward to when PG&E starts installing the smart meters in all the houses. Right now the meters have an indecipherable spinning wheel that shows who knows what and has to be read physically by a person who comes by. The new meters, however, will apparently be able to be read remotely by PG&E and eventually the customers will be able to monitor their energy use via the internet. I think that if people are able to see exactly how much and when they are using energy, they may make adjustments to their habits accordingly. At least I'm curious to see if it will.

How do you orbit Mercury?

Well, you start with a launch from earth, make 15 trips around the sun, including passing Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury three times for a total of 4.9 billion miles before settling into orbit almost seven years later. Of course, that depends on when you launch. NASA waited 2 1/2 months for another launch window in 2004 and that added two years to the trip. Today Messenger is making its first pass of Mercury, about halfway through its trip. I've been watching From Earth to the Moon lately so calculating flight paths has been on my mind.

Local Is The New Organic

I wanted to write about the book The Omnivore's Dilemma right after I read it (or actually listened to it) but I didn't get around to it. Today, however, a moment of synchronicity occurred that inspired me to write a post. For me the book's message boiled down to saying that eating local, even if it's not organic, is the way to go; support your local farms. With that in mind we signed up for a CSA (community supported agriculture) box from a farm up in Dixon. The box includes a dozen pastured eggs, which I could tell right away were much different than the eggs I normally eat. Today that difference was so much more obvious. I delayed going into work this morning due to a heavy rain storm so I cooked myself some bacon and eggs, which I usually don't do on a weekday morning. I only had one pastured egg left but I had a dozen organic eggs from "free-range" hens so I used one of those as well. The yolk of the organic egg fell apart immediately in the pan but the yolk of the pastured egg was like a super yolk. It was absolutely beautiful: it was orange, it stood high, and it had a well-formed shape. And it was delicious.

So that brings me back to the sychronicity. I braved the weather to make it to an 11:30am appointment, which lasted quite a while, and when I got back in my car and turned on NPR, what were they talking about on Talk of the Nation but pastured eggs. Of course it turned out to be Michael Pollen, the author of the book, who was the guest on the show. He has a new book, In Defense of Food, which he was promoting.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is a well-written book and it inspired me to be much more aware of what I was eating. The section on Joe Salatin's Polyface Farms was so interesting I briefly considered dropping everything and becoming a farmer. I highly recommend it but be warned that the first part about the industrial food chain, although amazing, is a little scary and depressing. It does get more positive from there, though.